The thrust of the argument is this: without legacy gatekeepers carefully curating the slush pile and winnowing choice for consumers, the unwashed hordes of self-published authors will unleash a deluge of worthless books that will engulf the good ones, preventing readers from finding anything worthwhile.

Of course it’s true that when there’s too much choice for consumers to sample individually, we need third-party systems to help us winnow the choice down to manageable levels. But it in no way follows from this that legacy publishing is the only or even the best such third-party system.

Here are few things to consider. First, when was the last time you sampled every single book in a bookstore before making a selection? Even in legacy’s heyday, the industry was publishing something like a quarter million new titles every year. Whatever winnowing function legacy provides, it therefore seems not a particularly stringent one.

Second, are there existing third party systems you primarily rely on to help you select the books you want to try? Recommendations from family and friends? Newspaper, magazine, and blog reviews? Search terms? The bestseller racks in bookstores? Amazon customer reviews? Do these means of winnowing choice seem more or less important than the traditional gatekeeping function that results in hundreds of thousands of new titles every year?

. . . .

Fourth, if consumers really needed gatekeepers to help them manage their choices, the Internet itself would be useless. After all, for any given person, it’s a safe bet the Internet is 99.99999999% crap. And yet somehow, every day, each of us manages to find the good stuff amidst all that crap, all without any gatekeepers keeping the unwashed masses from putting their stuff on the Internet.

The closest that they came to truth is with anthologies. The editor of the anthology selected worthy titles that fit a theme and published that. In some cases, like the very popular Martin Greenburg, that editor became a mark of quality for that set of anthologies.

Though not good for the big publishers, I could see something similar happening in indie country.

Joanna Penn had a guest on her blog (sorry, cannot recall the name) who said that the number of reviews was more important than the average of the reviews; that is, 3.5 stars over 50 reviews is better than 4.2 stars over 6 reviews.

When I was a kid, long before I knew anything about publishing, or bestseller lists or book reviewers, librarians and teachers told me about different books. Once they realized they had a voracious reader on their hands, they were more than happy to steer me towards all kinds of books, without judgment or restrictions.

Librarians love to talk with people about books, by the way. Just adore it.

Actually, I used to tour the entire sf/f section every time I went to the bookstore. Did a fair amount of that in the mystery section, too, although it was so much bigger (and included so many subgenres not of interest to me) that you couldn’t really keep up.

Oh, well. Now the sf/f section is a lot bigger, and the bookstore is online.